Nobody's Fool

Back to Basics

My daughter is learning to talk. Every day I share with her the simple joy of learning to build the bare bones of language — the fun ways to move her mouth and tongue to make pretty la’s and staccato da’s and ba’s, and then how to put those sounds together to make short, powerful words that mean something. She’s learning the importance of opposites — what goes “up” must always come “dow!” — and the never-ending game of being able to call out the name all the things that so important in her little world — “ducky” and “apple” and “cheese” and “shoes.”

I think the most satisfying part for her is how, when she uses the right words, she gets immediate results. She’s beginning to master the imperative, letting us know what it is that is rocking her waters at a given moment: that she wants “up” to eat in her high chair, that it’s time for a “baba,” or that her pesky new tooth is giving her an “ouch.” I as her mother am relieved and grateful for this most basic and effective communication. For the most part, I’m able to keep my little one satiated enough to get from morning to night without any major crises.

Along with so many other things that I’ve rediscovered in the past 15 months of being a new mom (experiencing along with her every day the sheer delight of simple discoveries), I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how our communication becomes so much more complex as our worlds get bigger. And how so many times when we communicate to each other in the business world, we make a point of doing so in a highly technical way. Why? Is it to prove that we know what we’re talking about, to show how smart we are? Or because we feel like we’d be doing a disservice to our very complex subject matter if we try to simplify what we’re saying? Or because we’re so in the weeds we don’t know how to step outside of what we know in order to explain it in a way that makes sense to others?

I’ve had so many people say to me over the years, “Our audience is very academic / technical / clinical, so they want to be communicated to in a formal and technical way.” That might be what audiences think they want, but at the end of the day, your customers and readers are still people. And they’re busy. Overworked. Overwhelmed with information, just like the rest of us. You can never do a disservice to your audience by communicating to them in a simple, straightforward, well-organized way, so that they can understand the message and how they need to react very quickly.

We were all 15-month-olds at one point. In our core being, where our inner toddlers still hide out, I believe we crave communications that make sense without trying too hard. And like my toddler, we find profound relief in understanding and being understood, in this world of obfuscation.

So next time you sit down to write a letter or marketing piece, think about what it is that you really want to communicate – what’s your imperative? Doing so will prevent the business-world version of what we experience when our message doesn’t quite get through at home: tomato sauce ground into the rug, toys flung across the room and messy, bitter tears.

Superchunking

Wooden Horse Publishing reports that, to appeal to younger audiences, magazines have "dumbed down." The company reports that editors now request an average 478 words from their freelance writers, compared to 738 words in the 1960s.

Of course, there's more at work here than just trying to appeal to Gen-Yers with short attention spans. Everybody reads differently now. "Chunking" is the new way to communicate. It's what the Internet has done to reading. Paragraphs have become counterproductive. In my work, whether I'm writing a brochure, crafting Web content, or writing an article, I'm more successful when I use sentence fragments, bullet points and lots of bold lead-in headers than when I try to expound on ideas much at all.

There's a real art to getting the right amount of information across in fewer words of course. I have to say that I work twice as hard to write more briefly, and in the end, that's not a bad thing, especially when I'm copywriting for maximum impact in limited space.

And yet ... I still find myself getting giddy whenever I stumble upon an unapologetically long piece of prose, the kind without subheads and bullet points and bold face; the kind that lets go and takes the long, scenic road home. When I take the time to pick up a New Yorker or an Atlantic Monthly (the appreciation for literary indulgence, of course, remaining intact more so on the East Coast than the West) and remind myself how much I miss the meandering of ideas that can happen in a good, solid piece of journalism. And then I wonder how often I'm really challenged by what I'm reading, er, skimming.